Private Spaceship to Make 1st Space Station Flyby Thursday

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The unmanned Dragon space capsule, launched by commercial company
SpaceX on Tuesday morning, is preparing to rendezvous with the
International Space Station for the first time early Thursday
(May 24).

Dragon has spent today (May 23) catching up in orbit with the
240-mile-high (386 kilometer) laboratory, and plans to fly within
1.5 miles (2.5 km) of it early tomorrow. The meeting will be the
first time a privately built vehicle approaches the station, a
$100 billion collaboration between five international space
agencies.

"Dragon fly by of Space Station planned for 12:47 am California
time. All systems green," SpaceX's billionaire founder and chief
designer, Elon Musk, wrote on Twitter today. That time translates
to 3:47 a.m. EDT (0747 GMT).

If all goes well on Thursday,
SpaceX will send Dragon even closer to the station on Friday
(May 25), approaching near enough so that astronauts onboard can
reach out and grab the unmannedcraft with the space station's
robotic arm and attach it to the outpost.

"There have been only four nations, or groups of nations, that
have berthed or docked a spacecraft to the International
Space Station : Europe, Russia, the United States of course,
and Japan," SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said during a
briefing before the launch. "So we really stand in awe of having
the opportunity to attempt this."

During the early morning hours of Thursday, Dragon will establish
communication with the space station using its "COTS Ultra-high
frequency Communication Unit." It will also run a test of one of
its navigation systems, called Relative GPS, which uses the
relative positions of Dragon and the space station to determine
the capsule's location.

Some of the space station's six-man crew will participate in the
tests on Thursday, including watching over the flyby and sending
instructions to Dragon to turn on a strobe light to make sure the
capsule can receive commands from the crew — a critical ability
for berthing.

After these activities have been performed in close proximity to
the station, Dragon will retreat, looping out in front, aboveand
then behind the laboratory in a racetrack pattern at a distance
between 4 and 6.2 miles (7 and 10 km) away.

The results of these tests will help NASA decide if Dragon will
be allowed to attempt to berth with the station the next day.

Dragon's mission is a test flight partially funded by NASA's COTS
program (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services), which aims
to develop private vehicles capable of filling the shoes of the
retired space shuttles for cargo delivery to the space station.

If all objectives are met on this demonstration flight, SpaceX
will be cleared to begin flying the 12 supply delivery missions
the company is contracted for at a price of $1.6 billion. The
first of these could come this autumn, SpaceX officials have
said.

SpaceX (officially Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) is based
in Hawthorne, Calif. It was founded by billionaire entrepreneur
Elon Musk, who also started online payment service PayPal.

Live coverage of the rendezvous activities will begin on NASA TV
Thursday at 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 GMT). A news conference will
follow at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT).

You can follow SPACE.com assistant managing editor Clara
Moskowitz on Twitter@ClaraMoskowitz.
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